Does the average forum make money?
 

How many forums actually have good income. What kind of numbers for membership do you need to start making money? any other comments would be appreciated as well.

I would use a membership called a VIP or something simular, and you want members to think its worth paying for...

I would say most forums lose money - simply because they are not run for profit, but because the owner has a major interest in the subject - i.e. for most people they are a hobby.

That was my thought, that most were for hobbys. Do you know of many that make a profit?

Yes, there are many that do that as well.

where does the profit come from? mostly from advertisers?

this is totally my opinion...but i'd say the ones that make good profits are from subscribers rather than advertisers...though i've only really been on about 100 forums...and i know there is way more than that...most of the ones i've seen don't have a lot of advertising...which leads me to believe most that make good money use subscriptions (and the fact i'm an admin on one that makes a lot of money through subs...that might bias me too :))

why do people pay to sub.? what do they get....there are so many free forums they could go to.

Thanks for the help.

If there is something special on your fourms, that guests, or anything that looks interesting on your fourms. Members would suscribe to a subscription, This could come in handy if many members know about it and you have a decent size forum.

Hi,

if you run a forum, you normally have one or more topic of interest your users share. If you have a lot of users that share the same interests, you are interesting for advertisers. Listen carefully to what your users say. Do they recommend products? If so, try to find out if you can sell those products or try to find partners offering those products that pay a commission. Offer premium memberships where you offer useful things with a real benefit only to the people that pay for it. Over time, you`ll gain valualble content from your users. Encourage them to produce content and then market the content. Extract the most valuable stuff and create (e)books out of it.

Make your community stronger by organizing real-life meetings. If the community -feeling ist strong enough, set up a merchandising shop (spreadshirt).

There are lots of possibilities to make money out of a community. Just take care that your useres don`t have the impression that money is more important to you than the users :-). If you are successfull, give your community something back.

Ciao,
Sacha

thanks for the comments. very well put. does anybody make money using adsense?

Indeed, the more people log on your forum the more page views you get, the more page views you get the more revenue you earn ;)

oh yeah, what would you write about your community?

What do you mean? You must have a concept before you bought your domain name? lol you can't copy another site and expect it to grow fast and earn $$$ UNLESS you use some 1 elses concept and ADD a whole lot more, so your offering loads of stuff to your community. But its best to be original, research is a good tool to start off with before starting a website / community...

the other user said to write ebooks, i was just curious what you could write about your community.

Do members get annoyed with adsense?

Na forget ebooks.. only do that if you know you got people to check your site... etc...

Adsense - every one gets annoyed with it but luckily not 1 person from my forum has mentioned it and i use it twice on every thread / topics /pm's full works of the forum.

It depends on how you present it, you can't just go wacking it out etc... theres ways of going about doing these things. I started off with adsense, you may not earn a lot but you will earn something lol even if its a few cents $$ but the more people you get to view your forum the more you will earn but not a lot straight away.. it takes a lot of hard work & time.

im sure every little bit will help at first to cover some costs. its really just a numbers game. anyway you look at it you need people there to be able to do anything.

i started another thread about promoting the site. Thats definately what I should be working on now.

Hi,my experience is that it does make sense. Of course it depends on what the main topic of your forum is. At some time I realized that people started to extract content from my forum and sold it on ebay. I then started to do it myself but with a more professional layout and some add-ons. The improvement of the quality is work but it payed off. You only have to be aware that your ebooks will appear on pirate-sites and that others will just copy them and re-sell them on ebay. But if you have a loyal community, you have an army of people that will sweep those sellers away.
again my experience is different. I use multiple adsense blocks in the threads for not-logged in users and one single block on top of the site for registered users. VIP-users can switch off the ad-block. My ad-sense revenue is about 500 euros per month. But I have a long filter list because the quality of ads is not good (casinos, strange job-offers etc.). You can use the experience you make with ad-sense to calculate your prices for banner-ads on your site (monthly rev./PI*1000). As the google-ads react on the content in your public forums, they are mostly on topic. I got a real boost when I added the line "this forum is re-financed by the google-ads on top of the page" to my and my mods signature.totally agree on that one.

all the best,
Sacha

Cant this get you in trouble? Or not really since its not directly asking people to click?

Hi,I admit you have to be careful here. The policies read:
It`s a thin line between information and incentive. To mention that the forum is financed by ads etc. is hopefully not a problem.

Ciao,
Sacha